Law enforcement officials work in front of the American Civic Association, where a gunman killed 13 people Friday before apparently committing suicide. Binghamton, N.Y., officials said the assailant apparently had ties to the center, which helps immigrants and refugees with counseling, resettlement and other issues.

A gunman invaded an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y., during citizenship classes on Friday and shot 13 people to death and critically wounded four others before killing himself, police said.

The killing began around 10:30 a.m. and was over in minutes, witnesses said, but the ordeal lasted up to three hours for those trapped inside the American Civic Association while police, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers cordoned off the area and waited.

Finally, officers moved in and found bodies sprawled in a classroom, with 37 terrified survivors hiding in closets and a boiler room and, in an office, the dead gunman.

The man’s ID carried the name of Jiverly Voong, but two handguns were registered to Jiverly Wong, 42, a Vietnamese immigrant who lived in nearby Johnson City.

Police said Wong had driven a borrowed car up against the center’s back door to barricade it against escape, then walked in the rain around to the front to begin the attack.

Unknown motive

His motives in the assault remained a mystery. Binghamton officials said the assailant apparently had ties to the center, which helps immigrants and refugees with counseling, resettlement and other issues.

Four wounded survivors were taken to hospitals. Two women and a man suffering gunshots wounds were being treated at Wilson Medical Center in Johnson City, and a man was being treated at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton.

It was the nation’s worst mass shooting since April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho, 23, shot and killed 32 people in a dormitory and classroom at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va., then killed himself in what was the deadliest shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history.

In the last month, 26 people, including three gunmen, have died in three mass shootings in North Carolina, California and Alabama.

Gov. David Paterson and other officials went to Binghamton. They expressed their condolences for the victims and their families, as did Vice President Joe Biden, in Manhattan to address a civil rights group, and President Barack Obama, in London for an economic summit conference.

Biden said Americans must find a way to prevent the kind of bloodshed that erupted in Binghamton. “We’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this terrible, terrible violence,” Biden told a gathering of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

Binghamton, a city of about 47,000 at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango rivers some 140 miles northwest of New York City, is the home of Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York.

The American Civic Association, a small nonprofit resettlement agency funded largely by the United Way, had resettled 53 refugees through its Binghamton center since 2004, most of them Vietnamese who studied English as a second language there.

Little was known about the assailant on Friday night. Officials declined to name the gunman, but there appeared to be little doubt about his identity. The name Jiverly Wong was provided by a law-enforcement official who declined to be named because he was not authorized to release information.

But the official said Wong had a New York State pistol license that listed two handguns, apparently the weapons he used at the immigration services center: a .45 caliber Beretta and a 9 mm Beretta. The authorities matched the serial numbers of the two weapons found with the gunman’s body to the serial numbers on the pistol license. Officials said they were trying to trace the histories of the guns. Other public records indicated that Wong had also lived in California in recent years.

At Wong’s home in Johnson City on Friday night, police were seen removing a rifle case, a box with a picture of a rifle on the side, and two black boxes that may have been handgun cases.

‘Nobody could escape’

U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey, who represents the area, said he was told by law-enforcement officials that the gunman drove to the center in a car registered to his father and barricaded the center’s back door with it. “He made sure nobody could escape,” Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said at a late-afternoon news conference.

It was unclear what connection the gunman had with the immigration services center, but there appeared to be no doubt that he was acting alone, Zikuski said.

Armed with the two handguns and wearing a green jacket, the gunman came out of the rain through the glass front doors of the center, entering a reception area where he encountered two secretaries. He said nothing, but shot both. One slumped dead, but the other, Shirley DeLucca, pretended to be dead, and as the gunman walked on she crawled to a desk and called 911.

Beyond the entryway, about 50 people — Russians, Kurds, Chinese, Arabs, Laotians and others — were in several classrooms at their desks in language and citizenship classes. The gunman entered the first room, a citizenship class, and resumed firing. As victims wounded and dying crumpled to the floor, students in nearby classrooms heard the shots.

Thanh Huynh, who translated the account of a young Vietnamese woman, said the group fell silent. The teacher called 911, then fled with the others, running for the back stairs to the basement. “They heard the continued shooting, very fast,” the translator said, “like 10 bullets, 10 shots together. They tried to hide in the basement anywhere they can, under chair, closet, storage room. Then, after they heard, so quiet.”

Police seize items at suspect’s home

JOHNSON CITY, N.Y. — Authorities have searched the home of the suspected gunman in the New York immigrant center shooting.

Police carried out three computer hard drives, a brown canvas rifle case, a briefcase, a small suitcase and several paper bags Friday evening.

Thirteen people were killed at the American Civic Association center in nearby Binghamton before the gunman apparently committed suicide.

The suspected gunman carried ID with the name of 42-year-old Jiverly Voong. A law enforcement officer speaking on condition of anonymity said that was believed to be an alias.

A second law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two handguns were registered to Jiverly Wong, another name the man used. Both officials were not authorized to speak publicly.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey says the man known as Voong had recently been let go from IBM. The company could not immediately confirm that.

— The Associated Press